Cristina Fríes
NEW YEARS, WE believe, was four days ago, but the party down the hill has not stopped since then. Those who walk through our hills—the drug traffickers, the guerrilla, the runaways—pause to listen to the boleros echoing against the valley walls, and know this place must be some kind of refuge. Without owning calendars but instead sensing the time of year through their memories or by watching the movement of the stars, they can tell it’s close to the first day of the new year. From the big house down the hill, the drum rhythms beat their way through the tall stalks of the tree ferns, inviting them to celebrate. I can even hear the party from our home when I’ve been bad and have to spend the night in the basement with the butterflies, blowing them off my nose with my sleeping, slow breath.
While some people who pass by our home will be dressed in muddy jeans, holding the hands of children who wear the faded clothes of their older siblings, others will be in green army suits with their pants tucked loosely into their boots. This migration, I’ve learned, is evidence of the warfare occurring in the rest of the country. Here, on the hill where we have always lived, we are not involved. I watch the people pass by us like streams while we stay put, stubborn as rocks. My grandparents have lived in this house since they became the groundskeepers, so many years ago they can’t remember when they first arrived, unsure if it was when they were children or married adults, if the dogs were theirs or if they belonged to the farm, if there was war or peace. From the doorway, we can see the big house through the fog. The house is taller than all of the trees, and looks as though it has always been there, firmly built into the landscape that has not changed since prehistoric times, dense with enormous tree ferns and colorful flowers the size of my head. Sometimes when I’m not doing my chores and I hike through these hills in search of mushrooms and grasshoppers, I imagine traveling onward, past these hills and over beyond the precipice that drops thousands of meters to banana farms and warmer weather, never stopping in one place but instead moving on across the country like the groups of people I so often see passing through my home.
The Andes burst up around us at all angles, like the dips and peaks of my grandmother’s body, her wide breasts when she lies in her bed, fat filling up every inch of the mattress, her belly rising above her sleeping, weeping face. There were times when I thought, from beneath the floorboards where I could hear her as I do now, that she was crying because of something I’d done. Over time, though, I’ve come to realize that it’s beyond my control—there is something haunting about a time that is lost to her, and that has caused her to deteriorate. I hear her cry about her ailments, though I know she can’t possibly be ill—she is much too stubborn. It’s cancer! she yells from above the basement, It’s a tumor in my heart, filling me up every day. I’m like a cow’s tit.
From down here, I hear the night nurse scurry around our house, her miniature feet scuffling across what sounds like the kitchen tiles, fetching my grandmother her tea, her rosaries, the things with which she plans to get cured. Someday I’m going to burst, and you’re all going to get hit right in the face, she says while praying to the Virgin Mary. You’re all going to drown in my tumor. Then she quiets down and falls asleep in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of her meal, giving the night nurse a sense of relief as soon as the bedroom goes silent.
The hatch to the basement is flush with the wooden floorboards, and if I kick it hard enough from down here, its vibrations must make our basement look like it’s haunted with angry ghosts. Looking up through a crack in the floor, I see the night nurse’s skirt glide overhead in the direction of the living room. While my grandmother rests, the night nurse spends her afternoons sitting on the couch and watching the dogs from the window—how many we have now, I couldn’t say, because every day some of them die and some new ones are born and there is no point in counting or naming them. I can hear the night nurse speak above me, but I can barely understand what she is saying—her voice is like the flapping of wings, so agitated and airy that it fills up every space in the house, a white humming, a mosquito in the ear. I yell at her from below the floorboards to go milk the cow, feed the dogs, just to make it stop. I’ve had enough with the butterflies as it is. If my grandfather were here, he’d be the one to tell her to begin preparing breakfast, made with whatever ingredients he’s stolen from the pastures, but since he spends his days tending to them—the carrot and potato fields, the fat cows and surly goats—that duty falls on me.
My grandfather only comes home for dinner, and just before dawn he disappears into the hills again. Every morning when I get up to begin my chores, I see a trail of his footprints leading away from our home, down the tiny scoop of our hill, beyond our cow’s stable, and then I can’t see them anymore. His footprints cover the hills of our valley, but I am never eager to follow them.
Last night I slept in the basement, and since there is no sunlight, the footsteps and the night nurse’s voice through the floorboards are my only clues that my punishment is finally over. I hear her unlock the hatch, and I rush to climb out.
In the living room, I shake off like a wet dog the butterflies that have latched onto my hair and knees. I stretch out my joints and bend my neck before pulling on my apron, which was once my grandmother’s. It is still too large around the breasts and waist, as I have yet to fill out, but I’m confident it won’t be long until I do. I stand in front of the reflective surface of a golf trophy my grandfather stole from the big house and in it I see my own curvature, or what I hope will be soon.
In my reverie, I almost don’t hear the knock at the door. It must be the escaped hostages who walk through our valley—who else would knock so quietly, with so much shame? The night nurse, nervous whenever we have visitors, hides in the kitchen while I greet the group of men at our doorstep.
Wearing jeans splattered with dried mud, they look around the house with modesty, asking if we have any water or milk to spare, calling me su merced, as if I were some kind of high-class city girl. Why yes, we have plenty, I tell them, even though we don’t—our old cow is as moody and as close to death as my grandmother. But it’s polite to offer your guests as much as you can provide. We are a pit stop in the middle of their long journeys across the country, and they will be grateful for anything they can get.
Our house lies outside of the big city, but we are hidden in the mountains, covered by their swooping shadows. The escaped hostages and the guerrilla soldiers who once kidnapped them camp and carry out their work in places like this, hiding in the jungle, and traveling by foot across our country’s densest and most secret terrains. Whether they’re soldiers or prisoners, I am sure that when these people hide in the fog that rolls in from the north, covering everything but the tips of tree ferns and pointed mountain bluffs, they must sometimes look around and think, Qué belleza.
It is a beautiful place, no? I ask these men, because despite their harrowed looks, I can see that they must be in awe of their surroundings. I watch them as they sip our herbal tea—some that I assume my grandfather has stolen from the big house down the hill. I tell the night nurse to bring us some pan de yuca, and she scuttles in her slippers into the kitchen, whispering things none of us can hear, while my grandmother screams at us from her room, saying, I am barely alive! I am tethered to life by a leg hair!
I ask them where they’ve been, how they’ve managed to trek through the steep mountainsides, and where they plan to go next. They don’t answer my questions, too polite to reveal anything specific, instead responding with platitudes and smiles and bowed heads to show their respect. It’s mostly light chatter with the escaped hostages, whenever groups of them come knocking. They are afraid of saying too much to a girl about what they’ve seen, or they’re shy. So I resign myself to watching them drink their tea in silence, wipe their moustaches with their ragged sleeves, and then march down our hill, toward the main house on the plot of land. The drumming sounds from the landkeeper’s house carry through the valley, reverberate through the trees, and reach our house as a quiet beat, as quiet but as incessant as the night nurse’s voice. While doing housework, I’ll sometimes find my hips swaying to its almost imperceptible rhythm. I wish the men a Happy New Year and, watching them march on, I can tell that today the hostages will make another stop on their journey to celebrate with the man who owns this land and who, like all of us, is unsure of the exact day of the year.
While my grandmother lies in bed, the night nurse tends to her health, and my grandfather disappears in the landscape of our valley, I perform the household duties. Today, I have to scrub the muddy footprints off the floor that my grandfather left after returning from his campesino work. Despite rarely being home, he leaves traces. With the crumbs of his dinner bread, I can see that he paces in the living room, which is small and full of patched-up furniture, and today, I spot new stolen objects scattered around the house: a lace tablecloth over the dinner table, and an empty vase on the windowsill that is surely over one hundred years old. It looks so delicate and fine, like a bird’s egg or a dandelion in the wind, that I am tempted to break it.
I have seen my grandfather fix fences that have been trampled, inject medications into the cows that, soon after, scatter madly across the landscape. I have seen him with his entire arm up the backside of a pregnant horse, and heard him break the neck of the smaller of the twins lying inside. I have also seen him kick the dogs, and I’ve seen his small, hunched figure hide around the back of the landowner’s house before returning with stolen items bulging in his muddy overcoat. My grandmother, in response to his thievery, says, Watch out, or the Devil will tug on your penis in your sleep! When my grandfather removes his new belongings from his clothes, he says that the rich man owns so many nice things that he will never miss them. He says the rich man will blame guerrilla soldiers or escaped hostages, who are known for their robberies. I imagine the men who were just here stuffing their muddy sweaters with pots and pans, soccer balls and candelabras. Where would they put them? I wonder. Do they set up their new china on fallen logs and eat great feasts in the middle of the jungle?
After cleaning the floors, I do the work that the night nurse, who is frail of heart, refuses to do. Today, it’s cleaning between my grandmother’s flaps of fat. It takes what feels like hours, going through every crevasse with my sponge. Barely noticing my touch, she stays asleep—a loud, snoring boulder. When I wash my grandmother, I often fear she’ll roll on top of me and trap me beneath her weight forever, and I’ll never get my own chance to feast in the jungles.
By the time I finish, the sun has gone down, the dogs have curled into a ball of worms to keep warm through the night, and I’m covered in grime and dust. I go to the bathroom and take off my clothes and fill the tub with warm water. My grandmother used special soap in her baths when she was still slim enough to fit inside the tub. I pour in half the bottle and relish in its pinkish hues, its luxurious smell filling the bathroom with the scent of angels.
As I step into the soapy water, I hear my grandfather open the front door. He tells the night nurse to heat up some rice and beans. And now, I know, he is approaching the bathroom to wash his hands. I take a big gulp of air and then my face is wet and my head and all of me is underwater and it is quiet. Finally, I think, savoring the solitude. I can see nothing but the black behind my closed eyelids, feel nothing but the silence like electricity in my ears. I wonder, Is this how the hostages felt when bags were tied over their faces, when they were knocked over the head and made to feel nothing, the way my grandfather told me it happens when people are taken into the jungle? If it had been anything like being thrust underwater, I think, it must have felt, momentarily, like freedom.
And then, I feel my grandfather pulling chunks of my black, sudsy hair, and the cold air again on my face. What are you doing? he yells. What do you think we are, royalty?
It’s true; I am taking a bubble bath. But after everything he has stolen, I don’t see the problem with my indulgence. His jacket is bulging with half a dozen heavy objects, making him look fat and demented with his nostrils flaring like a boar’s. His yelling wakes up my grandmother, who then begins screaming that nobody treated her like a queen in her whole life, that she never once got to use silver utensils or sleep on fur coats, that princesses don’t exist, that in her day she would have done something I was unable to hear because by then I was already being shoved into the basement, and all I could hear was the awful beating of butterfly wings.
The basement has no windows. My grandfather’s only attempt at making it livable was to throw in a cot with a blanket the size of a pillowcase around the time that I began making him angry because I’d been breaking his stolen objects. But even before he began his stealing, my grandfather would come home to broken dishes and ruined furniture. He’d look around at the mess and point his wrinkled finger at me and call me his nieta de mierda. I used to spill almost every drink or bowl of soup, but always by accident. It was the dogs, I’d tell him when he’d find a cracked mug or fallen flowerpot. Then train those damn dogs, he’d say. Put tags on them and put them to work. But when I’d see the dogs outside the kitchen window I couldn’t help it. I’d run out and chase them through the pastures. They were much too beautiful just to watch—they seemed to dance on the tips of the blades of grass, with light paws and open mouths, as though singing.
And sometimes it really was the dogs who broke things. When I’d forget to close the front door, they’d run through the house in their messy, hypnotic way. They’d stumble through the living room, slipping on the tile with their claws loud like a woman’s high heels. Past the kitchen, they’d burst through the door left ajar into my grandmother’s room and crawl over her boulder of a body, and she’d curse them and call them the spawn of the devil, and then they’d continue on through the house, which is small so it wouldn’t take long for them to tip over vases, drool on the countertops, discover food in places we would have never known food had been left. And then they’d be gone, their tails wagging high in the air so far away, almost out of sight, a cluster of brown and black moving steadily across the green, and around me all would be in ruins.
After seeing the house littered like this day after day, my grandfather finally said, Ha, now you will pay; now you will know how I feel about the mess you make in this house! He captured the butterflies from the pastures in glass jars and released them into our basement. Once the basement was full and we could hear the flapping of wings from outside, he shoved me in and locked the hatch. I see you running through the fields with your head in the clouds like the damn butterflies, he said. They’re omens, butterflies; they bring about disorder. So now you will learn what it’s like to live in chaos! he yelled, while my grandmother screamed something else, something I couldn’t hear.
He started punishing me like this three years ago or the year before that. I can’t be sure—I, too, have trouble keeping track of time. It’s even harder when I’m in the basement. I’ve grown into the habit of counting my thoughts before they drift somewhere else, hiding in a new territory of my mind, as a way to determine how much time has passed. Every time I come here the cot is somewhere different. Now, naked and wet from the bubble bath, I cannot find it, although the basement is small and there aren’t very many places it could have hidden. There are no lights, so my senses are reduced to touch, smell, hearing, taste, and intuition, which is the only sense women have that men don’t, I once heard my grandmother say before she got so huge she couldn’t get out of bed. We can see the things that are just marginally visible, like ghosts or the emotions of men. But now I cannot intuit where the cot is in this basement, and the butterflies seem to have multiplied, making it harder to sense with my other senses where I am and what I should do. I try and I try, but I can’t count my thoughts yet. Sitting down on the cold floor, naked and soaking wet, I hold my knees until I am perfectly still. Shhhhhh, I tell myself, stop screaming.
IN THE MORNING, the night nurse opens the hatch and a little ray of sunlight pours into the basement. Come, she breathes, hurry before they all fly out. And I do. My grandmother sees me crawl out, covered in butterflies—purple, orange, green spots on my naked body—and yells that I look like the plague. Stay out of my room; you’ll kill me with your breath! You’ll bring this country to ruin!
Sometimes I feel sorry for my grandmother, listening to her grotesque rants. She used to tell me about the days when her waist was smaller than her hips and men would take her to dance salsa at the bars in the city where she was born, and about the times when cities were made up of houses rather than apartment buildings and she could roam through both city and countryside without fear of strange men kidnapping her. And she spoke of the time she felt her past and present intermingle and she became confused with the timeline of her life. She found it hard to tell the difference between what was old and new, ugly and beautiful, whether the men on the street were flirting with or threatening her, which was why she came to this valley where the confusion of the city could never reach her. This valley is a place where time becomes stagnant, she said, and it weighed down on her until her body grew to be as round as a guava and her body sagged like sandbags and she never stood up straight again. Now, from her bedroom, she screams, Girls! Butterflies! Clean up my fat!, her words becoming more insufferable and incomprehensible as time goes by.
As I prepare to begin my chores for the day, I notice that my grandfather has placed new objects around the house again. Expensive-looking silverware and a golden candelabra decorate the dinner table now. The landkeeper’s framed family portraits have been placed on our walls, as though they were those of our ancestors. The new decorations make us look like we’re cultured and have good taste in art. It feels, somehow, like a special occasion. I don’t want to break any of it. Looking around, I think, Maybe this year will be a year of decadence. I imagine the house filled with men and women in fancy clothes. I listen for the sound of women’s heels against the tile. And even my grandmother might participate—we could cover her in lace and serve tea and cookies on her broad belly, if she behaves.
I’d hate to soil my nicest dress with the grime from my chores, but I wear it anyway, for the new year. There’s a butterfly latched onto my sleeve and I slap it off in a hurry. How awful, I think, these winged vermin.
Through the window I notice some men in green army suits hiking up the hill toward our house. They carry guns, and ammunition dangles around their necks like jewels, glistening in the morning light. They are radiant. I wait by the window, trying to hide behind the curtains so that they don’t think I’m too eager. The night nurse scurries from my grandmother’s room to the kitchen, pretending to be too preoccupied with my grandmother to tend to the guerrilla soldiers, who we both know will knock on our door. We are the only home for miles in every direction. The soldiers have the dark look of the indigenous Chibchas, but as they work their way up the hill they tear through the tall grasses like colonists, growing larger in the landscape from speck to toy soldier as they approach the house, until they are so huge they fill the entire window frame, so close that now they knock on the glass in front of my nose, looking me straight in the eye.
Buenos días, I say, opening the door. They nod their heads. I can’t help but wish I were wearing something more mature. I look at their rifles and I want to hold one, but I’m too embarrassed to ask. They look heavy, and my bony arms would probably break just by touching them.
Can I offer you anything? I ask the guerrilla soldiers.
They are men who know what they want—without hesitating, they say, Give us some coffee.
In our living room, the guerrilla soldiers sit on my grandfather’s ruined couch, while dogs run in and out of the house as they please. I bring out a steaming pot, and pour fresh coffee into the china that my grandfather stole, which I have not yet had the heart to break. The floral patterns are much too beautiful.
I pour myself some coffee too, although I hate the taste. Once everyone is still, I notice they are sparkling. Their ammunition is made of what looks like the shiniest of gold. They sit before me like princes, and instead of asking them about their travels as I had planned, I just stare at them, as though they’re statues at the Gold Museum in the city, which I’ve never had the chance to visit and which I’ve only heard of through those who pass by our home. They say it holds the last of the gold of the indigenous people that was not stolen by conquistadores. They say it with pained voices, sorrowful, like it just happened yesterday, as though they can’t tell the difference between a day and five hundred years.
Bueno, I say, tell me, what brings you to our valley? Have you been traveling for long? Sitting there, even in the yellow light of my grandfather’s favorite lamp, they look like our dogs, with rounded muscles and angular jaws, perfect and fierce, but trained. They smile, putting their muddy boots on the coffee table between us. One of them lights himself a cigarette, puffing smoke into our living room. The soldiers look like they feel at home, and I’m relieved.
The one with the thick eyebrows says, Pues, niña, we’ve been traveling for weeks. We’ve seen more than you’d ever dream.
Like what? I’d like to ask. But I don’t—the men are smiling in a secret sort of way, their mouths like closed locks, mocking. Instead I stand up and pour them more coffee, forcing my expression into one of mild interest rather than blazing curiosity. I fill each cup to the brim again, my hand never shaking. They’d never know how clumsy I can be. How proud my grandfather would be, how confused.
Niña, why do you not hesitate to serve us? the one with the thick eyebrows says, squeezing his cigarette between his fingers so tightly it looks as if the burning tobacco might fall to the carpet.
Well, I say, a bit of company never hurts. Most of the time I converse with the dogs, who really aren’t such a nuisance if you adjust your lifestyle to match theirs. Run with them in the fields, drink water on all fours. All you have to do is adapt! I say gleefully, and then you see the world as they do. One of the dogs is licking the hand of the man with the moustache, drooling on his knee, and he slaps him away. I can feel myself blushing and, hoping I sound polite, I say, Now, would you like to tell me about your travels?
The man with the eyebrows smiles, staring at me. My grandfather often looks at me this way after hard days in the fields, and then in an instant, without saying a word, he’ll throw me into the basement, even if I haven’t done anything wrong. But these men are different. They are shining in gold.
Well, niña, there’s not much to say, the man with the eyebrows says, blowing smoke. We see mountains, sleep in jungles, meet many, many people. But no women quite like you.
A woman! Even in this old dress. Beaming, I thank him, and say, I probably can’t compete with the women at the party down the hill. They must be, I imagine, more graceful and beautiful than a campesina like me. Then I tell them about the man who hosts parties that last all day and night. His party must still be going on this morning. Do you hear that? I ask. That’s the sound of cumbia and boleros.
Looking at them lined up on our small couch I realize how rude I’ve been because, isn’t it obvious? They’re hungry. Bring us some cookies, I yell out to the night nurse, who is hiding in the kitchen.
I see the men looking with interest at the stolen objects that decorate our living room and weigh down the thin walls that I’ve scrubbed clean so many times to please my grandmother. I know the appearance of order is important to her even if she cannot see it from her bedroom—but if she could see the house now, she’d feel like the high-class woman she never was. And now, here are the guerrilla soldiers, those who have seen faraway lands, sitting before me like princes. They are scanning the room, looking at the walls and the night nurse with eyes that seem incapable of sight, glazed over with a fog of sudden desire. Maybe they’re impressed with our luxury—who would have thought our humble home held such marvels?
The night nurse brings a plate of our nicest chocolate cookies, which trembles in her hands. I smile, thinking how nicely the space of the house has filled today: the sounds of visitors, the thickness of it, the smell of leather boots and tobacco, the scraping of their fingernails against the couch, almost drowning out the sound of my grandmother who, from behind her bedroom door, yells, Who’s out there? Imbeciles!
The dogs are licking up the crumbs on the floor, frantic with their hot breath, sniffing for more. Tell me, niña, one of the soldiers says. Come close, and tell me—he swings his arm out, gesturing toward the rest of the house, the luxurious ornaments—where is it that you got all of this?
For the first time, I feel like hugging my grandfather, wherever he might be. Well, I say, it all belongs to us—my family, I mean. The men look at me with faces whose meaning I cannot intuit, so I keep talking. The man just down the hill owns beautiful things like these, but more of them. And probably grander, I add to seem modest. Really, you must go visit his home. His party is still going on, can’t you hear? They look out the window at the house with curiosity. These men make me want to tell them everything about our lives in this valley, but first I must apologize for the butterflies that have landed on the lapels of three of them. I bend toward the soldiers over the coffee table, swatting the insects away. I can see their nostrils flaring, feel their deep inhalations upon my hands. I explain how the butterflies have made themselves at home against my will. Don’t worry, I despise them too! I say, and I suppose they think that I’m tougher than my fancy dress suggested to them upon first glance. A girl who hates butterflies. A girl who drinks from china teacups. Of course I am no ordinary campesina.
I pour another round. In the back of my mind where my intuition lives, I can hear my grandfather scolding me for being so tactless around strange men, for not keeping my mouth shut, and for using up all his coffee. Still I go on, telling them about the crops my grandfather tends, about our dogs, who are leaping onto their laps and sniffing their gold rings, as if they’re just as hypnotized as I am by their splendor. Even the night nurse stops sweeping in the kitchen to join in on the conversation, though nobody can hear her, being soft-spoken, with a voice as small as a housefly. I can hear my grandmother now, yelling about how this is her house and she has lived here her whole life and has never once been invited out to dance at the parties of that rich puto and now she is dying and those parties are for those who wish to be first in line to hell. Just then, the man with the thick eyebrows takes out his rifle and yells at everyone to shut up, goddammit, just stop talking!
By now I gauge the time to be past five o’clock on some day around the first of this year, and the guerrilla soldiers are itching to leave. It’s a new year, and we must be going, the man with the raised rifle says. We have business to attend to. He points the gun at me, at the night nurse, and then at my grandmother’s closed bedroom door.
I stand up. I want to join them and see the world as they do: the swooping landscapes almost bursting at the seams with life, the open air, the hills and jungles so often covered in fog that I cannot imagine what sorts of creatures or people live out there without seeing them up close myself. These men might have the things I want, hidden in their suits or in campsites just over the mountain. I imagine feasts in the jungles. I imagine shooting their ammunition into the skies.
My grandfather should be coming home soon. I beg them: I want to celebrate the new year. Can’t I come with you?
The night nurse grabs my arm, shaking her head and whispering something that sounds like a flutter of wind, dying and worthless. But it’s too late; I’ve already planted the idea. The guerilla soldiers look at me with that same hungry look from before, and I smile. They grab my shoulder and lead me out of the house, leaving my grandmother screaming in her bedroom, saying something that for the first time I am able to ignore.
Outside, surrounded by guerrilla soldiers, I feel protected, like I’m inside a tank. We hike down my hill, and I feel we’re a team, the way we’re walking. I keep step with theirs and I watch our feet move—we’re a single living thing, a beetle or a centipede, a thing with so many legs. My yellow rainboots and their black combat boots. Nearing the bottom of the hill, we stomp through a bunch of butterflies that had been resting in a heap of grass. Watching them burst into the air around us in a frantic flurry, it’s like we made them blow up. Something inside me feels like counting, like yelling. When I get a gun, I’ll shoot them through and through. Watch their wings fall to the ground.
I realize we’re approaching the landkeeper’s house. Up close, it’s even bigger than I had expected. The adobe-tiled roof tilts at a sharp angle toward the grassy field, and its large windows are lined up in rows, three stories up. The music gets louder, and the people celebrating become silhouetted in the windows like puppets. To make conversation, I ask the guerrilla soldiers if they like dancing, but none of them respond. Their faces are stiff and they stomp through the field like they own this land, but they don’t.
Although this land belongs to the landkeeper, I still feel a sense of ownership over it, since I have lived in these pastures and walked through these trees my whole life, which might not seem very long for somebody like a guerrilla soldier but for me it’s everything I’ve ever known. Now, walking with the soldiers, I see it transformed. I can finally understand why the trees grow at certain angles and why the fences are placed where they are, though they are broken, trodden on by cows and passersby. I picture it through the eyes of someone conquering territories, and pick out the trees I’d want to keep as my own. When we reach the entrance to the house, it almost feels like a home I have owned for many years but have never had time to visit. I push my chest forward and raise my chin like women do when they are proud, and I walk through the front doors, letting the music swallow me up.
Inside, the narrow hallway opens to a living room full of people. I wave at them and imagine myself saying, Hello, my country, my people, hello. The music is so loud that nobody would even hear me anyway, so I scream and laugh and say strange words, and they all just keep dancing. I recognize some of the partiers as the hostages who had come by my house yesterday. They are dancing with other people who also look like escaped hostages, women with red cheeks and hair matted to their foreheads, clothes like rags and blotched with dirt. The walls are covered in portraits and paintings of the strange beasts that live in these mountains. The room is full of other treasures too, gilded decor and old books, though certain sections of it seem bare and sad. I wonder if I notice these gaps because I know something is missing. To anyone else, it might look as if nothing has happened here at all.
There’s a band in the corner near the window, one with a drum between his knees, another singing while playing the accordion, another playing the guitar. Cumbia fills the room and people cheer. As I clap along to the music, I feel myself being pushed into the crowd. I look around, and realize it’s the guerrilla soldiers who have pushed me. They have spread out along the perimeter of the room, guns raised at all of us. The one with the thick eyebrows yells at me, Dance, puta, dance.
Fine, I say, I like dancing anyway. And it’s true. I learned to dance in my butterfly basement. It happened on my birthday, the last year we celebrated it. I wanted everything that I could sense outside the bounds of these acres of green, green land, but that day all I received was a cake with a single candle stuck in its center. I looked at it and it made me want so many things I couldn’t even begin to name them. But then, like some instinct I never knew I had, all I wanted was to destroy the things that actually belonged to us. I reached for the cake. I still remember their looks of horror as I held it aloft in the dim light of the kitchen, and the way the frosting left prints like trodden rose petals on their shirts. I tasted the sweetness of the frosting on my fingers, then spit it out at their faces. The night nurse, who cannot stand the look of food that has already been chewed, shivered in her frock.
I went into the living room and started ripping out the stuffing from the couch, because I had seen the dogs do it and I wondered how it felt to rip something at the seams and let the insides burst out. The feeling made me want to sing, and I did. La vida es un carnaval, I sang, Hay que vivirla cantando! I could barely hear my grandfather’s voice as I began throwing the yellow balls of stuffing around the living room, as though in celebration, until he opened the hatch to the basement and threw me inside. I was locked in there for days, or what seemed to be days, according to the number of thoughts I was having before I lost count. The butterflies flapped around my body, making little tornados of air, blowing my hair around my face. The basement, the disorienting darkness, the unmarked passage of time, made me question my grandfather, this life in our house on the hill, and why I felt compelled to celebrate. But after a long while, in the darkness where I could barely see my own hand in front of my face but where I could hear the rhythmic humming of the butterfly wings, I began to move unknowingly to the beat of their flight. I felt my rib cage pivot around my spine, my hips begin to sway. Days may have passed, but it felt as though it could still be my birthday, and my intuition was telling me that what I was doing was dancing.
I look at the people around me, who are now turning away from their dance partners and looking up at the men, who are pointing their guns at us. The music falters, but a soldier yells at them to keep playing, so they do. I can see now that there are more guerrilla soldiers occupying the house than the rest of us. It seems more soldiers have trickled in since I arrived. I look in the corner of the room and see a man wearing the kind of clothing I always imagine city folk wear, with a scarf wrapped neatly around his neck. I realize that it’s him, the landkeeper. He, like the guerrilla soldiers, seems to shine with gold on different parts of his body—his glasses, his teeth, the buttons on his coat. The guerrilla soldiers have backed him into the corner with their rifles. The soldiers make the man look like he doesn’t own this house, this land, but he does. He, like the rest of us, gets pushed onto the living room dance floor. Dance, they tell him, dance like the others. Passing around bottles of beer, the guerrilla soldiers say between swigs, We will have order!
They think they have us prisoners. Music is playing and we are dancing because that is what we have to do, but don’t they know that this is what we have always done during New Years, when we know something will happen to us that changes the way we live our lives? The forward pushing of time, we feel it pressing inside our bodies. Come out, I want to tell it. We are ready.
I think about my house up the hill and my grandfather’s basement full of butterflies, and my grandmother’s fat that rolls over the edge of her mattress, threatening to anchor her to one place and time until she dies. I don’t know how many thoughts I’m having and I can’t tell how long I’ve been in the home of the landkeeper, but it must still be New Years, because nothing has happened to mark its ending. For now, we are stuck in the in-between of one year and the next. We are celebrating this moment, expanding it out toward even the hidden spaces in this valley, the fields where my grandfather works each day, my basement, filling all of it with our wanting. I’m at the party at the landkeeper’s house wearing my nicest dress with butterflies still latched onto the hem. And around me are the guerrilla soldiers, and the men and women displaced from their homes who before this were walking toward a new life, a refuge. I wonder what it would be like to walk across this landscape now and see through the window that although people are being taken captive, they are still dancing and covered in butterflies, and if that’s not reason to celebrate then I don’t know what is.
Cristina Fríes is an MA student in creative writing at the University of California, Davis. Many of her stories explore ways in which women and girls contend with displacement and placelessness, disorientation, and trauma. Traveler and nomad at heart, she splits her time writing in California and Latin America. She is currently at work on a collection of stories and an opera. More at cristinafries.com.